LATEST FEATURES, ESSAYS, COLUMNS, ROUNDTABLES, & REVIEWS

By Eiichiro Oda. Released in Japan by Shueisha, serialization ongoing in the magazine Weekly Shonen Jump. Released in North America by Viz. Translated by Stephen Paul. One of the most obvious things that a reader will pick up on when reading any given volume of One Piece is how much fun Oda must have while creating it. Jump manga in general is very good at showing off the author’s joie de vivre, but Oda in particular makes you think of the title as a giant rollercoaster of pure wow. In particular in this volume, the scenes in the Seducing Woods are amazing, being a combination of childhood dreams of everything being alive and talking to you (including all the sweets you eat), and the horror of everything being alive and…

The not-so-brief edition! Akuma no Riddle, Vol. 5 | By Yun Kouga and Sunao Minakata | Seven Seas – How much you enjoy this final volume of Akuma no Riddle may depend on how much you enjoy stories having a happy ending even if they have to pull the logic out of their asses somewhat. The anime finished long before this, but the beats are essentially the same, as is the result. That said, the manga is definitely making things a bit more “yuri,” and since that is the main audience for this series, I imagine fans will appreciate that if nothing else. Also, we have some really hot women in suits on the cover, and that’s worth the price of the book in and of itself. In the end,…

By Patora Fuyuhara and Eiji Usatsuka. Released in Japan as “Isekai wa Smartphone to Tomo ni” by Hobby Japan. Released in North America digitally by J-Novel Club. Translated by Andrew Hodgson. Our little smartphone novel has grown up to a degree, and it’s something I view with very mixed feelings. Sure, we still have the occasional plotline that is just “Touya and friends lackadaisically do relaxing things’, but I can’t really call this a pure and innocent isekai anymore. It’s reached puberty and is trying to act up. Oh, rest assured, there’s no actual sex or anything. That would require losing an audience that the author is not prepared to lose. But Touya just seems a bit more cynical in his dealings with things, and he’s thinking about women a…

If you haven’t visited Book Dragon, a website for “the multi-culti reader,” now’s a great time to do so. Host Terry Hong just posted a thoughtful, two-part list of her all-time favorite manga, from Naoki Urasawa’s 20th Century Boys to Fumi Yoshinaga’s What Did You Eat Yesterday? (Side note: Hong religiously reviews each new volumes of What Did You Eat, for anyone who loves its particular mix of delicious recipes and domestic drama.) Her taste is decidedly catholic; you won’t find any out-of-left-field surprises or true guilty pleasures on either list. I’d argue, however, that such conservatism is the list’s real strength, as it emphasizes titles whose craft would be obvious to anyone, not just a dedicated manga reader. Click here to read part one; click here to read part two. For extra credit, what…

My News and Reviews I shifted around my usual posting schedule at Experiments in Manga a little last week so, instead of posting July’s Bookshelf Overload, I ended up featuring my review of Kazuki Sakuraba’s most recent work to be released in English, A Small Charred Face. The book is scheduled to be released in September (I received an advanced copy from Haikasoru for review purposes), and is definitely worth checking out. I’m not especially interested in vampire fiction, but A Small Charred Face makes for a very interesting contribution to the genre and I loved the queerness present in the story. Sakuraba is probably best known as the creator of Gosick, which I’ve been meaning to read, but my introduction to her work was through Red Girls: The Legend…

By Hajime Isayama. Released in Japan by Kodansha, serialization ongoing in the magazine Bessatsu Shonen Magazine. Released in North America by Kodansha Comics. Translated by Ko Ransom. “Tragic backstory intensifies” would be a good description of this volume, for the most part. Eren continues to have dreams that flash back to his father’s life before he was born, showing us the fate of Grisha’s first wife (she appeared in the story earlier than we think, it turns out!) and what our kingdom really is – an island kingdom, with most of the world very much not dead on the other side of the ocean. We also, as predicted, see Eren and Mikasa in jail for the orders they disobeyed in the previous couple of books, though that doesn’t last, mostly…

Yona of the Dawn Volume 7 by Mizuho Kusanagi I knew when I first picked up Yona of the Dawn that the reader would eventually be getting awesome archery moments, but it has been quite a road getting there. Yona has been evolving into an action heroine for the previous six volumes and this is finally where all her practice sessions pay off, as Yona’s team along with benevolent pirates manages to stop some horrible human trafficking. Yona and Yun manage to break away from the other captives and signal for help, but not before Yona endures some intense and scary moments. But when she finally gets a bow in her hands she assumes an intimidating power, suddenly her captors find themselves frightened by a girl they were dismissing casually…

By Yuu Kamiya, Tsubaki Himana, and Sino. Released in Japan by Kodansha. Released in North America by J-Novel Club. Translated by fofi. Ugh. I hate the (2) that’s sitting in the URL up there. Why couldn’t this book have had a subtitle like some other light novels? In any case, as the URL shows, I’ve reviewed Clockwork Planet before: the first manga volume, which Kodansha Comics put out back in March. And now we have the light novel it was based on. When I had only mild enjoyment of the manga volume, I was told a few times that the light novel is significantly better. And indeed those people were right, as my enjoyment of the novel was significantly better – especially in regards to Marie, whose inner workings (so…

Osamu Teuka hit rock bottom in 1973. Mushi Production, the animation studio he’d launched to great fanfare in 1961, had just declared bankruptcy. Although Tezuka had parted ways with Mushi in 1968, he was still linked to his old company in the public imagination — Mushi was, after all, the studio that had introduced Tetsuwan Atom to television viewers around the globe, and made Kimba the White Lion a household figure in Japan. Tezuka also faced a creative crisis: his work was out of step with emerging trends in what he called “young adult manga,” a point he plaintively addressed in the afterword to the 1974 short story collection Melody of Iron: The media was whispering that I’d hit my wall… With a broken heart, but also rebellious determination, I…